Beautiful, Ugly Scablands & Small Town Life

Bryan Robinson

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Sujets

• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669844600
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Beautiful, Ugly Scablands & Small Town Life
 

 
 
By Bryan Robinson
 
Copyright © 2022 by Bryan Robinson. 824168
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Scripture quotations marked AMP are from The Amplified Bible, Old Testament copyright © 1965, 1987 by the Zondervan Corporation. The Amplified Bible, New Testament copyright © 1954, 1958, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
 
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-4461-7

EBook
978-1-6698-4460-0
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 10/28/2022
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Flood
Tri Cities
Palouse Falls
Benge
Hooper
Random Scabland Region Photos
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“giant series of wounds on the earth’s sur face…
a single lava flow over 20,000 square miles…reaching an average depth of more than 2,000 feet…The rush of water onto the plateau was ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world…” & “A lake in Montana drained, sending an immense volume of water over the Plateau at speeds of up to 45 miles an hour, reaching a depth of 900 feet …but destined to later become the richest and most productive wheat-growing region in the world.”
INTRODUCTION
I personally find the so-called scabland areas beautiful, like a sea of wheat, sage, and rocky glacial outcroppings.
Some people have found the region otherwise:
“…farmers found tracts of scabby outcrops of black basalt, broad expanses of raw gravel, and dry stream channels, which people in Washington call coulees. Those harsh areas were nearly worthless as farmland. The farmers called them scabland.” ( Glacial Lake Missoula & its Humongous Floods -David Alt)
But Zane Grey described the beauty of wheatland as:
“Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling, smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men who had conquered over sage and sand.
“These simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft gray and golden billows of land, insignificant dots here and there on distant hills, so far apart that nature only seemed accountable for those broad squares of alternate gold and brown, extending on and on to the waving horizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country,...” where “Whirling strings of dust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay back from the wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky, heavy with substance.
“A thousand hills lay bare to the sky, and half of every hill was wheat and half was fallow ground; and all of them, with the shallow valleys between, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty of them was austere,…Years, long years, were there in the round-hilled, many-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old. Here and there a straight, dusty road stretched from hill to hill, becoming a thin white line, to disappear in the distance. The sun shone hot, the wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of wastelands, once the home of other races of man… could have shown so barren an acreage.
Half of this wandering patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and combed and harrowed,… The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest; and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun. A singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long, slowly rising slopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving lines on all sides. The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; it was sublime because not a hundred harvests, nor three generations of toiling men, could ever rob nature of its limitless space and scorching sun and sweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creep back toward the desert that it had been.
“Here was grown the most bounteous, the richest and finest wheat in all the world. Strange and unfathomable that so much of the bread of man, the staff of life, the hope of civilization in this tragic year 1917, should come from a vast, treeless, waterless, dreary desert!
This wonderful place was an immense valley of considerable altitude called the Columbia Basin, surrounded by the Cascade Mountains on the west, the Coeur d'Alene and Bitter Root Mountains on the east, the Okanogan range to the north, and the Blue Mountains to the south. The valley floor was basalt, from the lava flow of volcanoes in ages past. The rainfall was slight except in the foot-hills of the mountains. The Columbia River, making a prodigious and meandering curve, bordered on three sides what was known as the Bend country…, where the best wheat was raised, lay widely separated little towns,.. It was, of course, an exceedingly prosperous country, a fact manifest in the substantial little towns, if not in the crude and unpretentious homes of the farmers. The acreage of farms ran from a section, six hundred and forty acres, up into the thousands.”
THE FLOOD
The Missoula flood waters came through Hooper, Washtucna, Kahlotus, Connell, etc., many years ago, at 60 mph, cutting canyons, then turning south at Connell and dumping 500 to 1,000 feet of water on what is now Tri-cities. The canyons and exposed rock formations and wildlife are a geologist’s and photographer’s dream.
The region is now very inappropriately named scablands, and some people think it is barren and ugly, but I think it is beautiful. Wildlife like it too.

Old Kahlotus highway 260 next to historic Missoula floodway canyon & now dried up lake
TRI CITIES
Great places in Tri-cities are the paddleboat, Great Wall chinese food, & Good Wills in Richland and Pasco .
Avoid 4pm Hanford traffic.
Huge boat races occur on the Columbia in the summer.
Kadlec hospital is superb if needed. Avoid Lourdes hospital.
A huge car show is in June.
A very large Hispanic flea market is held east of Pasco on the Pasco/Walla Walla highway. Fruit, clothing, color.


 


Paddleboat on the Columbia

Free milk for the squeezin. This is the same guy who told me to plant beer bottles in my garden.

 
Pasco courthouse ceiling, with different small towns in the county featured.
As you head north up the freeway 395, look for the great country store on the east side of the freeway
Pass by tiny almost ghost town of Eltopia, then Mesa, and on to Connell.

Old school in Eltopia


Before you get to Connell, the joke 1 tree national forest has an osprey nest on top


 
Old Brick store, downtown Connell. Owned by a 20 year old girl. Big variety on two floors. Great prices. She thinks her father helps, and he does, but he also runs off some customers with his ex-cop and anti-social ways.

 


 
Me in awe of the incredible geology of my new area. I have been photographing this region for several years. This book is mostly a photo tour of the region, with just a bit of writing mixed in. I need a place that is wide open,with lots of wildlife, and isolation and privacy. This region and small towns provide that.
 
Being sworn in as mayor of Benton City. I was Trump too early. I was a very good administrator with a very good clerk, with improvements and budget surplus, but I was not a good politician because I always said what was on my mind. And still do. Parts of this book do just that.

Once when Mayor, a guy came into city hall screaming at the clerks because his water had been cut off for non-payment and he said he had an infant. I asked him which one was the infant.
Then some guys confronted me on the street about me not allowing a topless place in town, saying they wanted to see titties. I took my shirt off on the street.
The sheriff asked what he could do and I told him to restore our city police. He said he would get me. He did. I was assaulted by a neighbor, but the sheriff falsely reversed it into filing a false statement. My attorney told me he was selling out so he could get a judgeship. He did. He replaced the one that sentenced me to jail, who was soon found to be corrupt and thrown off bench.
The ex-mayor I defeated tried twice to recall me. I won both times in Supreme Court.
The City came and began digging on my property. To stop them, I jumped down in the hole. The sheriff arrested me. The newspaper and letters to the editor supported me.
 
I was arrested once in high school for going back to get a friend from the park we were told to vacate, then again in college for being at a party that was out of hand in the back yard.

What a life. A good and interesting life.
 
I say any man that any man that has not been arrested has not stood for anything. When in jail, a regular friend says “sorry”. A great friend says “that wa